Haskell Wexler

So much has been written about Haskell Wexler over the years that I’m going to keep this intro brief. Suffice it to say that Wexler is simply one of our greatest living cinematographers. He’s in a class by himself as much for his fearless sense of justice as for his groundbreaking technical innovations, but it’s his lifelong commitment to putting his lens where his mouth is that makes Wexler such a unique source of inspiration to so many moviemakers.

From his pre-teen days filming striking union workers in 1934 Chicago to shooting the 2011 documentary Bringing King to China, Wexler has always wielded his camera with the belief that it is every bit as capable of influencing hearts and minds as the written word. Though he has won two Academy Awards (for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in 1966 and Bound for Glory in 1976), like so many iconic artists, Wexler’s greatest artistic achievement may be himself.

From his groundbreaking, self-financed anti-establishment feature, Medium Cool (1969) to the workers’ rights documentary Who Needs Sleep? (2006), Wexler’s social conscience has been his career-long guide. But he was perhaps never as fearless as when he made his second film as writer-director, 1985’s stunning Latino.

A direct product of his rage at the U.S. government’s attempted overthrow of Nicaragua’s Sandinista regime, Wexler filmed Latino in a war zone, capturing realistic footage at great personal risk in an attempt to increase American awareness of the political upheaval occurring in Nicaragua at the time. The strategy backfired when the film was suppressed by its distributor. But now, Cinema Libre Studio has done its part to correct that injustice by releasing a director’s cut of the film on DVD.

As Wexler approaches his 90th birthday, this lifelong vegetarian is still vital and brimming with energy, working on several new projects and writing a regular blog. In 2011, he even won a seat on the board of the International Cinematographers Guild.

I recently spent an afternoon with Wexler at his office in Santa Monica, where we discussed Latino’s initial reception (at home and abroad), socially-conscious moviemaking and the reason for the film’s re-release.

Tim Rhys (MM): When Latino first came out, it didn’t get the release that you wanted. Do you feel like the American public wasn’t ready for it?

Haskell Wexler (HW): Latino was made when there was a secret war in Nicaragua. We had great difficulty in being able to physically even get to Nicaragua, because the State Department put the word out that renting equipment was impossible. The rental companies wouldn’t rent us equipment because the insurance wouldn’t cover it, so I had to buy lighting equipment. I had to get a Chinese ship, because no U.S. ship would transport the equipment we needed, like uniforms, lights, cables and cameras.

When the film was completed, the first time it was shown was in Washington D.C. and the conventional media, including The Washington Post, weren’t sure how to deal with it. They didn’t present it as a dramatic film, but as a sort of attempt to do a documentary. Therefore, it was not worthy of attention. The Post had a pretty harsh review which, fortunately, they allowed me to reply to. The reviewer was challenging my patriotism, and I felt I had to say that I made Latino as a patriot. I said I didn’t think that conducting a surrogate war—paying mercenaries to destroy educators and co-op farms and an elected government in Nicaragua, and to do that with American equipment and American trained personnel—was what America was all about.

MM: What was the reaction to your reaction at that time? Did you get public support for your point of view?

HW: The way media deals with something like my film is to ignore it. Fortunately, George Lucas came [on as an executive producer] after I’d shot the film… and we got an invite to the Cannes Film Festival, where it was very well received and got an award called “a du regard.” The rest of the world knew a great deal about the Contras and the situation in Central America.

MM: The American public was largely unaware of the situation at the time, right?

HW: By the time the film came out, it was just being revealed. Ronald Reagan, as you’ll see in the director’s cut, was describing the Contras as the moral equivalent of our founding fathers. And [his statements] had a twist that I hadn’t seen in films or in State Department statements up to that time: That it’s okay to kill people, because they deserve to be killed.

I’m oversimplifying, but in narrative movies we have good guys and bad guys. Once we decide who the bad guys are, it’s okay to do anything to them. And the more technically advanced [the manner] we dispose of them is, the better it is. That it’s actually better for them because, in the long run, we’re making them more advanced, more civilized and more “democratic.”

MM: You said that the way the media dealt with a film like this was to ignore it. Do you feel as if the release of Latino suffered a kind of de facto sabotage? Or do you really believe the media just didn’t know how react to the film because it was fiction that almost played as documentary?

HW: The system never has enough space for little pictures. It’s not the kind of movie that will incite masses of people to fill theaters. It was made under extremely difficult situations; we were actually under fire many times. We were shooting in towns where, just four or five days before, what we were reenacting in the scene had actually happened. The wounded were just a week away from actually being in that situation with the Contras.

So even though the blood was put on by our makeup person, I didn’t have to give them direction as to what expressions they should have on their faces. It was very close to reality.

MM: The footage you shot is incredibly realistic.

HW: I had actual information about the way the Contras had tortured people from a man who had been tortured by Somoza’s government. He told me, ‘No, no. You put the electrodes over here, and the best way is metal bedding.’ The CIA had a manual for the Contras on torture techniques and ways to uncover suspects, usually potential leaders, including Catholic priests active with the Sandinistas. 

MM: Did you envision all of this before you got there? Or was most of it conceived on the spot, similar to the way that Medium Cool was filmed? You were there for five months, right?

HW: Yes. I had asked Skylight Pictures—Pam Yeats and Tom Sigel— to go in with the Contras. So they made a little film with the Contras. And they’re both fluent in Spanish and they have scenes where the head of the Contras shows them all the big cases of ammunition and material that was given to them by the U.S.. And I was down there with Ginger Varney, who worked for LA Weekly at that time. I was in Honduras with American Green Berets. And that was where I got the idea, because some of the Green Beret guys were Latinos from L.A..

MM: Were some of them sympathetic to the cause of the Sandinistas?

HW: No. None of the Green Beret guys. They were soldiers, they were doing their job and they liked the excitement.

MM: You mentioned some of the difficulties you had getting equipment. What were some of the other challenges of this shoot? I imagine there were heat and insects. Talk about what you dealt with during those five months.

HW: The film was sabotaged by the CIA from word one. All the equipment had to go on this Chinese ship. I had a UCLA student who went down with the equipment and got it unloaded.Turns out he was a plant by the CIA and was screwing things up. Our trucks were sabotaged and parts were stolen. In addition, there was a guy on our crew named Marvin. He was hit as part of a Contra invasion. I have a photo of him right here. It says “Marvin, friend of Haskell, killed during filming of Latino.” He was really good worker on the film. But the Sandinistas had armed everybody—women, children—to try to defend themselves. And you see a scene in the film where the young girl shows the young boy how to handle an AK. I learned to do that, as well, but I was very careful never to carry a weapon because I didn’t think that was right… that’s not why I was there.

MM: How close were you to the actual fighting? What was your physical proximity during the majority of the shooting?

HW: The way the Contras worked is that they would make forays into Nicaragua. And then, as in the film, they would sometimes recruit people or get them to do their work for them. It’s not that the Sandinistas were angels or some great, super-progressive force. They weren’t, but the connection with the Church and with non-Soviet socialism was good. But Somoza had been there. And that whole system of business and keeping workers down and exploiting them didn’t just disappear because some mostly well-meaning people wanted to change things. And they were literally under attack. Making a feature film with that background is difficult. You have to concentrate on your characters and try to deal with the practical obstacles. 

MM: Did you assemble your team here before you went down there? Or did you assemble most of your team there? I know your DP was already chosen, because he had worked down there before.

HW: The crew that I brought from the U.S. was Pam Yates, Tom Sigel, Scott Sakamoto and then, of course, the actors. All the rest of the crew were from Puerto Rico. But those were my key people. And the equipment was mostly my Éclair CM3, which is a French, portable 35mm camera.

MM: Four hundred foot magazines?

HW: Yes.

MM: There must have been a lot of variables in filming down there. How did you estimate your budget?

HW: Part of the expense was buying equipment, which normally you would rent. No house would rent to us because the government had told the insurance companies not to cover us. So a lot of the expenses were logistical. The actors weren’t getting big money. (laughs) We were there a long time. I don’t really remember what the budget was, but my mother paid for it. (laughs)

MM: How did you convince your mother to fund your film?

HW: Mom wanted me to do good things.

MM: She believed in what you were doing.

HW: Yeah. And then I had friends, too. One friend was the distributor of the Éclair camera, Benjamin Berg. He was my producer. And we were able to get equipment by way of Panama. We had some film, almost a week’s worth, which we sent up to New York to be processed. And a week’s worth was stolen. The insurance company couldn’t find the film; it was in huge boxes, and they said it was the first time that had ever happened. They determined that it was some governmental agency that stole the film. So we had to re-shoot almost a week’s work because that. But the insurance company paid us, because they were obligated to see that the film was delivered.

MM:  You had a extensive documentary career before this ever happened. Were you in some way disillusioned by the documentary form and what it could do to change public opinion? You could have made a pretty hard-hitting documentary about this subject matter; why did you choose to make Latino as a narrative feature? 

HW: I did make a film with Saul Landau called Target Nicaragua. But the boundaries between feature and documentary… I always feel that they’re blurred. I do think that both formats have to have something that dramatically engages people, and how you do that is where the art is. Seeing Latino now, it doesn’t fit into big-ticket entertainment, but I do think it lives as a part of history.

Today, documentarians are realizing that their films have to have humanity, because if you just have people declaring what’s politically and socially correct, you’re not going to engage an audience. And yet you don’t want to present things dramatically that are amorphous. You don’t want so much information, so much complication that audiences won’t respond other than to say “Well, wasn’t that interesting,” without ever thinking about how it relates to humanity, how it relates to peace, how it relates to what all people want out of life, where we can find elements of agreement.

I was talking at the Hammer Museum recently about photography and the obligation cinematographers have to communicate. Because it’s not just like you and me talking now; there’s the possibility that what’s behind the lens can be somebody’s truth… If you’re making a dramatic film, you have to know how to deal with actors, you have to know how to work on scripts, you have to know how to frame. Those techniques have to be integral to the ideas and with the drama. It’s not just knowing how to use the most advanced technical tools, it means having something going on in your heart and in your head that you want other people to feel, and while you’re doing it to be able to be able to listen to those people. Particularly in documentaries. We all learn from the people on the other side of the camera. If you don’t, you’re not going to make a very good documentary.

MM: Is it fair to say that you were frustrated by the inability to say what you wanted when you were making Target Nicaragua? Is that why you had to expand some of those ideas with Latino? What motivated you after you had already made the documentary to go back and explore further and get deeper and turn it into a narrative film?

HW: Well, hardly anybody saw Target Nicaragua (laughs). And I thought that people might see what we call a dramatic film. I wanted to make a dramatic film that I thought was honest, but my honesty is limited by my viewpoint. Still, looking back at it, I think it’s a good film. And I know that all the people who were experiencing the film weren’t “political.” They didn’t come in saying, “Hey, the Sandinistas are God’s gift to democracy.” It was good to have actors like that. Because if everybody was as “dedicated” as I am, it wouldn’t have made the film any better.

MM: But the reason you made it was to get these ideas across on a wide basis for the American public, I would imagine.

HW: The main thing is that it was a dirty secret, and it was only exposed because a CIA guy’s plane was shot down over Nicaragua and he admitted that he had been sent by the CIA. That broke things open, because the U.S. had always denied that they had anything to do with what was just a civil war in Nicaragua.

But even as I’m telling you all this so many years later, who the hell cares? Who the hell cares about the Sandinistas, Nicaragua and the Contras? The reason I want the director’s cut to come out now is to say that the people in power still, in our country, will pay and arm bad people to go into another country and kill their women and children, and do it all for “a good cause,” because we pay them. We pay mercenaries. We’ve seen this in Iraq and the Middle East now, too. That is not what America’s all about.

Fortunately, the situation did get exposed, and Ollie North was arrested. Of course, now he’s got show on Fox News. (laughs) And Rumsfeld lied to us—he went out and killed a lot of Iraqis and a lot of good Americans who thought they were defending America—and he wrote a book that was on The New York Times Best Seller list. No one’s putting him in jail.

MM: So Latino helped get the word out, and now you’re hoping that Cinema Libre’s director’s cut release will give the film a second chance?

HW: I hope so. I hope people see that the characters speak of themselves as “Latinos.” People need to realize that we’re all on this planet together. When we are able to demonize people that we can’t see or don’t know, then we can kill them, take them over and lie to our own people because “They’re the bad guys.” And then when our bad guys are acting so bad that their people get upset, we will replace ’em with bad guys who don’t act as bad as those bad guys. So we’re talking about theater, we’re talking about drama, we’re talking about fiction. They don’t act for the camera, but they still own the TV stations, run the army and find nicer ways to torture people. That’s the way it is, so we have to go with the idea of the people having power and having to be able to follow through with it.

MM: The film still seems timely. It was made 25 years ago and we’re still talking about some of these same issues now. How did the idea for a director’s cut come about?

HW: I asked Cinema Libre to release this director’s cut because of the concentration of military activity that is stealing from our country; robbing our schools, parks, libraries and jobs; and settling things through aggressive militarism. This whole idea of buying cannon fodder and aggressive recruiting… Young Latinos without jobs are going into the military because of promises [being made to them] that are not being kept.

MM: Do you feel that the U.S. public’s appetite has changed at all to the receptiveness of this message? It seems to be even more discouraging today, the way that the public is anesthetized, more involved with their computer gaming and sports and all the other distractions. Are there any hopeful signs that this re-release is going to have an audience that actually listens to the message this time around?

HW: Oh, I don’t know whether this director’s cut is going to make a big difference. I’m just one guy and my mom put up the money for the film. (laughs) If it does make any difference for somebody, then two things will happen: It will make the world a little bit better and it’ll make me happy because it’ll make me a good boy for my mom. 

I hope that other people feel this way; sometimes we call it a “conscience.” I’m just personalizing with my mom, but that is how change happens. It also happens because we have to be aware of each other. That’s what happened in Egypt, that’s what’s happening in the Middle East. When people are aware of each other, they realize they have power. And those who have a platform—and the Internet and cameras give you that ability—have the responsibility of not just complaining about the way things are, but pointing them out. What’s more important? Human beings and life, or killing? Winning? Winning no matter what? I guess the word is responsibility.

MM: Also optimism. You still seem like a pretty optimistic guy, even though a lot of these efforts that you’ve made are, excuse the worn-out analogy, a bit like Don Quixote jousting at windmills. But you and I are Facebook friends (laughs). You have a Facebook account. When I came in here today, you were talking about a flip camera. You’re also a blogger. It seems to me that you’re still very much involved, and you’re adapting to social change in yourself and with your moviemaking. How do you stay so optimistic and forward-thinking?

HW: Optimism. You know, I also hear the word “hope” a lot. And I hear the word “dream” a lot. Those are emotional responses. You see signs of negativism and signs of optimism, and what you have to do is search them out and say, ‘I’m going to run with this optimistically.’ Many friends of mine don’t have jobs or the things that they need in their lives. They just want to be able to pay for their houses or apartments. But they see all the government’s resources going into the military or to feeding the corporate system, and that’s their political education. They say, “Why is that? Why can’t I afford health care? Who’s representing me? Who’s telling me the truth? Who buys or rents these politicians?” And I say when those questions are raised and answered, we’ll have optimism.

And they are being raised in the universities. Just yesterday there was a demonstration at UCLA. The students are complaining that the tuition is going very high. And there’s the healthcare issue. All of these bread-and-butter issues are tied in with our societal priorities, which right now are askew because of the lies we’re fed through most media. So that’s the obligation of those of us who [are part of the media]: To try—through our music, documentaries, feature films and personal conversations—to break that barrier. That is what gives rise to true optimism.

MM: It strikes me that you, as an artist, still believe that you can make a difference. You’re not someone to say, “If McCain gets elected, I’m moving to Canada.” You stay here and do your work and you try to make a difference in the best way you can, even though you’re only one guy. You have as broad a voice as you can muster, and you do what you can with that, and you’re content. That’s what I mean about your optimistic nature. What gives rise to that spirit, Haskell?

HW: What gives me my spirit is feeding on and listening to people who have the power to say, “Look, I’m a good person, I’m doing what I can, I’m struggling to make a living.” And I know that I’m not alone. I know I have a weapon, if you want to use that word, which is called a camera. And I want to try to have that communicating device as a part of who I am. That makes me feel good. And if somebody pays me some money to feel good, so much the better. And that’s what keeps me optimistic.

MM: How do you look for your next project? Is it always something you’re already impassioned about? How do you take that germ of an idea and muster the personal energy that it takes to turn that into a feature film? And when you have that idea, how do you pull the trigger?

HW: Well, between Latino and now, I’ve made quite a few films. And I’ve worked for John Sayles on a number of films. I like to work with good directors and good friends. I shot a thing with Billy Crystal called 61*, a baseball movie. And it was a pleasure. Because doing your work is part of life, and if you enjoy the people you’ll learn a lot, and the film will be a success. The thing is, if the box office isn’t great, you’ve still done something good. I’ve been very fortunate that way with the people I work with and the kind of films I’ve made. And, of course, I’ve made documentaries. I made one called Who Needs Sleep? about the film business. And I’ve worked on many other peoples’ films, and even TV. I worked on a segment of “Big Love.”

MM: You did a documentary about the nuclear issue, as well.

HW: Yeah, I’ve made several films about that. I made War Without Winners. I made No Nukes, a concert film. I made Paul Jacobs and the Nuclear Gang, which was about atomic fallout of a test here. I shot up in St. George, Utah where the government went and gave iodine pills to all the kids and kept things quiet.

MM: That’s why I brought that up. Once again, your moviemaking is very timely. What do you think about what happened in Japan, in light of what you learned from making that film?

HW: Well, I was really excited to hear that the water cannons they used to dispel anti-nuke demonstrators are now being used to try to cool the reactors (laughs). But basically, it’s no nukes. It doesn’t make any sense business-wise, and it doesn’t make any sense health-wise. It’s cruel and insane. And for us to live in this world and hear all these scientists on TV saying, “Well, it’s just a little more than you’d get from a regular X-ray.” No one says anything about radiation being cumulative. No one’s saying the incidence of world-wide cancer has increased partly because of nuclear tests. The stuff is in the air for, they say, 250,000 years. So, you know, I shot [One Flew Over the] Cuckoo’s Nest. And I have a scene from Cuckoo’s Nest on my blog where one of the actors says “I’m not talking about my wife, I’m talking about my life. I’m talkin’ about content.” And all these things that are said by the people in Cuckoo’s Nest are saner than what’s [actually] going on, which we accept as normal things. Just on TV, you know? We accept it all, we accept the frame.

MM: So many environmentalists called nuclear energy “green energy.” At least until this latest incident.

HW: But that’s how it’s sold to them, you know? Just look at cigarettes. My dad died of cigarettes at 57 years old. I did most of the Marlboro commercials. Everybody had known that cigarettes were deadly for years, since when I was a kid. But they were able to sell us because it was making money. They knew it was addictive. Those people don’t go to jail. The idea that the whole system would take something like that and go with it is the same thing that’s going on with nukes and pollution. And now they’ve cut the money for public broadcasting.

MM: You’re still very passionate about these issues.

HW: Of course. We’re in the film business. The way things are now, we can’t get jobs. A lot of my friends who were actively making films all the time, there’s just not the work out there [for them]. They’re ready to work, they’re good at what they do. But we’re not separated from the rest of the work force. These are difficult times, and there’s a lot of talent that is not going out there that could be shooting things and doing things to feed optimism.

MM: Just to follow up on that thought, the people who do have work, are they doing the 12 on, 12 off? Your 2006 documentary Who Needs Sleep? is about working conditions in the film industry. Have they changed?

HW: A number of really good directors have now said, categorically, “We don’t work more than 12.” My son Jeff’s on a picture with Cameron Crowe. The crew was so happy, they’re working, getting done on time. Everything is good about it. And I think that, just from a practical sense, directors find that that they don’t have to beat up their crew, and everybody can do better work and come out alive and healthy afterwards.

MM: You’ve made so many films, but I want to talk about two in particular. Both Medium Cool and Bound for Glory are among my all-time favorite films. I saw Bound for Glory again just last night with my wife, who had never seen it before, and she was amazed by the film, as well.

HW: Actually, Medium Cool’s playing at the Aero Theater [in Santa Monica, California] on Sunday. I’m there for Robert Forrester, the actor who played the cameraman in that movie. It’s been playing quite a bit. It played in San Francisco at the Castro Theater last week to a full house, sponsored by the San Francisco Museum. Great discussion. And when I was shooting in the north of Ireland a few moths ago, near where I shot The Secret of Roan Inish, the Belfast Film Festival was going on and they heard I was in the country. So they invited me down and played a print of Medium Cool. They had a great discussion about having armed soldiers in the streets, and tying that into what was happening in Chicago. But they were also interested in seeing the city of Chicago. There were slums. Some of the scenes in Medium Cool, I never thought about, but there are scenes where you see little kids with bloated bellies. People outside of the country would never think it was set in Chicago.

MM: It’s still considered one of the most influential films of all time and is studied in film schools around the world. You’ve done many of these screenings. You and I first met at a DGA screening a couple years ago. What are some of the questions that routinely get asked from audiences after you screen the film?

HW: Well, a lot depends on the audience, but usually they get into thinking of it as a documentary. And basically, it was written about a month, and finished about a month-and-a-half, before the convention.

MM: You even anticipated the riots, didn’t you?

HW: In no way did I anticipate the size and the scope of it. And what is not in the script was the way it ended. There were police dealing with demonstrators at the end, but I knew that if the government rejected the anti-war movement, there were going to be demonstrations in Chicago. I knew a lot of the anti-war people, the “hippies,” as they were called. I knew that they were going to demonstrate in Chicago.

MM: So you knew that there would be demonstrations, you just didn’t know the extent of it or where it would happen.

HW: That’s right. I was sent to Chicago by Paramount to do a film called The Concrete Wilderness. It’s about a young boy who finds animals in the city. And it was written by a friend of mine, the cameraman Jack Couffer. And Peter Bart was an officer of Paramount, and he knew I wanted to direct. And so he said, “Well, this book would be a good film for you to do.” And they had bought the film rights. It’s written for New York, but when I went home to Chicago I realized all the things that were brewing. So I wrote back to Peter and said, ‘You mind if I change the script a little bit?’ And he said “No, it’s okay.”

MM: How did you manage to get complete creative control?

HW: Well, it was a negative pick-up deal, so Paramount didn’t have any money in the film. I had to borrow the money on the basis of Paramount’s distribution. It was $600,000. And my brother Jerry helped me with that.

MM: Did Paramount try to influence the editing at all? Or was it completely done by the time you delivered it?

HW: Yeah, but where Paramount came in is… see, in a negative pick-up you have to comply with all Paramount’s regulations, with the Director’s Guild and with all the other Guilds. And you have to have a certain sound system, certain givens. And then, when you deliver the film to them, having complied with all those things, then you’re supposed to get your money back. But when they saw it, Bob Evans and the guys there, they just shit (laughs).

MM: Didn’t they make things up to delay it? You needed clearances for people in the park, all that kind of thing?

HW: Yes. There were all kinds of things. Paramount did everything to not have the film go out. And then, finally, a year after it was ready to go out, it came out with an X rating, so they let it piddle out. Even now, you can’t buy a DVD of Medium Cool. They have individuals and people on Amazon selling DVDs of Medium Cool for a hundred and fifty dollars. And I’ve been trying to break through that and make it available on DVD. And I did get them to make a new print for the showing up [in Belfast]. But it’s on the list of the hundred most important films in the last century.

MM: So Medium Cool was suppressed, and Latino was sabotaged much later and didn’t get the distribution it deserved. Did you ever get discouraged? At any point did you feel like you weren’t going to be able to say what you wanted to say as a moviemaker?

HW: All I know is that I don’t measure the success of what I do by the box office. To the extent that box office represents people seeing the film, it’s a compliment, but I also know that the commercial world has control over presenting things that would impact the box office. I’ve never felt that I was wasting my time or, hopefully, the audience’s time (laughs).

MM: What advice you would give to young moviemakers about how to choose projects so they don’t waste their time. So many people are making movies right now that will just never get out there. It sounds like a Yogi Berra-ism, but there are so many outlets now for films that nobody sees the films.

HW: I think I’d give ’em the same advice I give my grandkids, or anyone else, and that is to just live a life. In other words, if you’re interested in making movies, don’t just saturate your eye with other peoples’ films or what’s selling or not selling. Be connected to the world. And have your pores open; if something interests you and turns you on, explore it. Then, if it means something to you that you’d like it to mean to someone else, and if you have a device like a camera, then create something.

MM: So much of your body of work is meaningful. That’s a testament to your tastes and, I would imagine, your ability to make those choices by not needing to take the very next job. How much does the pragmatic aspect of this business have to do with your project choices?

HW: It’s safe to say that most people don’t make a choice. They might say, “Look, this is a thing I will not do.” But it depends on where they are economically. I’m just thinking about the last commercial I shot. I’m a vegetarian. The last commercial I shot was for Carl’s Jr. (laughs). And I had to shoot this guy eating this big, greasy, hamburger. And what am I gonna say? I had an assistant, Ralph Gerling, who’s now dead, and we did a lot of films. Sometimes those films were not going well, and I’d be complaining. And so he had a chant he told me to say: “I need the job, I need the job, I need the job, I need the job.” And then he’d tell me, “If we weren’t on this job, then we’d be on some other fuckin’ stupid job.” So you know, none of us can be the artist all the time.

MM: True enough. But you come close, it seems. Where do you think your deep sense of social responsibility comes from? Your parents?

HW: Some people would call my sense of social responsibility irresponsibility. What are you always bitchin’ about, always complaining? Like my relative down the street, he’s got Fox News on all the time. All the time! So he limits himself. I don’t know. It’s not a personal thing, you know.

MM: How do you mean? It seems like it’s very personal.

HW: Well, there are certain basic things. You need to start on the big side. You’ve gotta look at the globe the way the astronauts looked at it, with no borderlines. Then you can see that it’s one world, which includes all of humanity. And you can see that all of us, in one way or another, are interrelated. And that interrelation can be for life, for future, for nature, for God or for your great, great grandchildren. Or it can just be for winning, defeating, conquering and exploiting. And then, when you have those balances in mind, you have to say ‘Which side am I on? Do I have a feeling of responsibility?’ And then you mentioned the word “practical.” That’s true, but you have to know where pragmatism starts and where it ends, you know?

MM: I read one interview with you from quite a while ago where you said you wanted to switch hats and do much more directing than cinematography. I think you were talking to Roger Ebert. So what changed? You obviously didn’t stop shooting.

HW: Well, it’s not like you decide to be a director. In the first place, I’m from Chicago, so I shot documentaries and I also shot industrial films. And then I worked on other people’s films. I just didn’t decide. It just sort of happened, you know?

MM: I would imagine you kept getting offered great projects as a DP because you were so good at it.

HW: No. I was blacklisted. And I didn’t have an opportunity. I worked for Encyclopedia Britannica films. I had an opportunity to shoot a bunch of Shakespeare films in England. And all I had was the passport I had during the war, my military passport. And I needed a passport to go to England with John Barnes, who was a director for Encyclopedia Britannica films. It was my big break to work on dramatic films. And my passport was yanked. And if I wanted it back, I had to come in and talk to people, talk to the FBI and so forth. And then I had my father come with me to a Congressman we knew, and we asked ‘What the hell is this?’ And he said he couldn’t do anything about it. And so I didn’t go in and talk to the FBI, because I knew what that meant. Because all around the country, people were being blacklisted. And out here people think blacklisting means a lot of big-time writers sitting around their swimming pools reading books and things because they can’t get jobs. But the blacklist went out all over the country to teachers, to workers, to heads of unions. And I was active in the student movement early on. So they had five hundred pages on me, I found out. I was not able to work out here in Hollywood.

MM: The FBI called you potentially dangerous because of your background, your emotional instability…

HW: (laughs) Oh, you saw that!

MM: (laughs) …your activity in groups that you were engaged in, your activities not amicable to the United States.

HW: One of them said early on that I wouldn’t make it in the film business because I was “too finicky.” I remember that phrase.

MM: How long did that go on for you?

HW: Oh, I don’t think it ever stopped. It doesn’t stop with a lot of people. It just changes forms.

MM: How do you mean? Do you think you would have gotten offered other work?

HW: Well, the blacklist was worked out with the studios the unions. Certain pictures you don’t work on. Certain people don’t call you. It’s not just because of political things, but now they, the studios, have “shit lists.”

MM: So you think you’re on some of the shit lists—

HW: Oh, of course!

MM: This long after the blacklist period?

HW: Oh, sure. Sure. And I know other friends [who have the] same thing.

MM: Because you’re outspoken and lean so far to the left?

HW: What’s left and right? (laughs) You just realize what’s going on. Why aren’t there people in the streets screaming about public television, public radio? Screaming about Bradley Manning, an American soldier who’s being tortured without charges? Not to mention just the smaller things all over. The closing of schools, the lack of money for Planned Parenthood, all the assaults on everything that’s decent and human in our society because “we can’t afford it.” Don’t people realize what’s going on?

MM: Do you think, 30 years ago, there would have been more outcry about these kind of social issues?

HW: What I’m saying is that, incrementally, the frog’s in the hot water. We have lost our human base. When you get down to people, person to person, when they’re relaxed and they don’t have their jobs or lives threatened, and you ask, ‘What do you want out of life?,’ they’ll tell you “I want enough to eat, I want to be able to read, I want to be able to have my place, I want to have my family. I don’t want to have to hate anybody or beat anybody.” That whole thing happens incrementally. It goes through our educational system, it’s how you get your marks. It’s how you win, and it goes on in our precious sports, in all those things. The term “rugged individualist,” you know? That whole idea that if you work hard enough, then you will “succeed.”

You don’t see victories for socially good things. You see military victories, the camaraderie, the joining of action and the feeling and dedication of groups who are organized to kill. But that same thing is what makes progress reverse. Take the civil rights movement. You see marching in the streets, singing, holding hands. That positive factor is a group force, it’s a people force. And our media, our drama and our social content derides that. That’s why in China, for example—I worked on a film called Bringing King to China—they don’t want any particular religion or group or idea, not on the basis of the content, because a sense of community and accomplishing things together can be a threat to the controlling powers. 

MM: That’s exactly what Bound for Glory was about. Right?

HW: Bound for Glory was so much weaker than it could have been. I mean, Woody Guthrie was a friend of mine, and David Carradine was no Woody Guthrie. David Carradine was a pot smoker, and I’m not saying anything about smoking pot, but he was a laid back kind of a guy. And that’s important. Woody was out there with the people, involved with them. And so David Carradine’s character was maybe more acceptable, dramatically, to the audience when Hal Ashby made the film, but…

MM: That’s really interesting to me. The movie was so lauded and, for my money, it’s one of the most beautiful movies ever. Obviously you were praised for it as highly as you could be; you won the Best Cinematography Oscar in 1976 for it. But you weren’t happy with the portrayal of Woody Guthrie?

HW: No. The family didn’t like it, either. The music was really bad. And David Carradine was stoned out of his mind most of the time, so he wouldn’t tune his guitar. My son was a sound man on it.

MM: I noticed you shot from a lot of angles where you didn’t see him actually playing. You didn’t see his fingers—

HW: Probably, yeah. But anyway, it’s a good film. It was a step in the right direction.

MM: It’s an amazing film. The lighting alone—all magic hour shots. And you gave it that soft glow to create a nostalgic effect.

HW: I want to show you this new DVD of Elia Kazan’s America, America. The thing that I liked about working on it with was that it told Kazan’s personal story about his family coming out of Anatolia, coming here for the new life that America gave so many Europeans.

MM: I read somewhere that’s the film you’re most proud of making. Is that true?

HW: Yeah. And, of course, I did it with an Italian crew, so I learned to speak in filmmaking Italian pretty well. I had all kinds of debates and arguments about Kazan being a stool pigeon.

MM: I was going to ask you about that. How did you reconcile your feelings on the blacklist with what he did? 

HW: Well, I knew some of the people who he stooled on. And it ruined their lives. Actually, one of them committed suicide. Others left the country. And he didn’t have to stool. Kazan didn’t. He was set as a New York director.

MM: I interviewed Rod Steiger, who hated Kazan for that reason. But you worked well with Kazan? You enjoyed working with him as a person?

HW: Yes. And I did vote for him. I was on the board of the Academy.

MM: For the lifetime achievement award?

HW: Yeah. And there are a lot of great stills from America, America. We had a great still man on that. And, of course, it was black and white. And we never saw dailies, which was unusual. And I thought that was pretty good discipline for me as a cameraman, because [it let me] do things more dangerously (laughs). I think if I saw [dailies] it might have made me more conservative.

MM: Having won the last Academy Award for black and white cinematography, do you lament the passing of black and white?

HW: Yes. And I lament it because I got really good at it (laughs). But there’s also a whole argument that some people, one of them Conrad Hall, put through, about black and white. There’s some idea that the Greeks did not see color; they saw things in black and white, and [Hall] thinks that, with black and white, you put in your own colors. And it’s sort of a philosophical thing. Lighting-wise, I worked with James Wong Howe on Picnic. That was his first color film, and the people from Technicolor were selling him on the way they said he had to do it. “You have to have certain ratio between the key and the fill, otherwise it doesn’t work in color.” And Jimmy Howe just said, “Well, I’m gonna do it basically like black and white, except the film is slower.” And that’s what he did. And it was sort of a breakthrough in the way color films were made.

MM: How should a moviemaker think about light? I know a producer thinks about it as just illumination. But a cinematographer thinks about it more in an artistic sense, considering mood. As both a great cinematographer and a great director, how would you encapsulate how one should, when first planning a film, choose this stock or that stock, or the best kind of lighting package? What is the first thing to consider?

HW: Well, your job is to direct the eye and be in touch with the story. So you direct the eye by lighting, by framing and by camera movement. And sometimes you want to have mysteries for the eye, as well. Sometimes the mystery is more in keeping with the story.

MM: Tell me about American Graffiti.

HW: Every year they have American Graffiti celebrations, believe it or not. And they had the 35th anniversary of American Graffiti up in Modesto, California. And I shot a whole little movie about that. And I also shot something at Bob’s Big Boy here in the Valley, where they have all the hot rod cars. And I made a little film about that event. And when George Lucas gave me a lifetime achievement award at Tiburon, we talked, ‘cause I’ve known George, I helped get him into film school. And he gave me help with finishing Latino. He’s sort of like a kid to me, and I have somewhat of a father relationship with him. We’re politically very, very different. George’s conservatism is respectful. I’m totally respectful to his political conservatism. I tried to rile him up when Reagan called this anti-missile thing “Star Wars.” I said, ‘Jesus, George, we’re spending these millions of dollars on something that’s not gonna stop any missile from coming in at all.’ And he’s using the “Star Wars” name, you know. So he did complain about copyright. Nothing political, per se. But they did change the name of it. They started calling it the Missile Defense System, maybe for theatrical reasons. But that’s about as far radical I ever got him to go besides, well, the end of American Graffiti. After they left Modesto, one of the guys was gonna go into the Army, and that whole reference to the Vietnam War was part of my doing.

MM: Can you tell me a little bit about your relationship with Conrad Hall? He was a dear friend of yours and, other than you, my favorite cinematographer. Tell me about how you met Conrad and relationship with him.

HW: The timeframe with me and Conrad Hall is long. I met him when he was just coming out of USC. And he was interested in the Éclair camera, so I think that’s how we met. And he formed a company called Canyon Films.

MM: So you met him right after USC? And you became partners with him for a while?

HW: That was much later, yeah. Then we formed a company called Wexler Hall, which made commercials. We did Marlboro commercials, Wells Fargo, all kinds of car commercials, hundreds of them.

MM: Who was the shooter on those? Did you have to talk about that?

HW: It was always separate, because we were shooter directors. When we decided we wouldn’t shoot cigarette commercials anymore, they came to me and they said, “Well, this is for Europe. We’re gonna shoot in Italy, and it’ll only be about four days of shooting, and you can bring your crew from here and you can have a week off in Paris on the way back.” And so I said ‘Well, really?’ And the budget was, I think, three hundred thousand dollars, which was a pretty big budget in those days. And so I said, ‘Well, you’d better talk to Conrad.’ Conrad is my partner, and he’s in the other room. So when they went into the other room I had a moment. I can’t recall what they call those moments. But I said to myself, ‘Jesus, Haskell, you’d be willing to split the profits with Conrad if he says yes.’ (laughs) But Conrad said “No, we’re not doing any more cigarette commercials.” I forget what Studs Terkel calls those kind of moments, some kind of phrase in the English language.

MM: You were friends with Studs Terkel as well, right?

HW: Oh, yeah. From the time I was a kid in Chicago. I acted in the Chicago Reparatory Group, which he was a director of when I was in high school. I played Lindbergh because I was the tallest guy, six-one and a half in high school. And Lindbergh was always a tall guy, and it was live theater. I think I had two or three lines in it. But Studs was my teacher. You mentioned Medium Cool. Studs was the one that found my cast for me. He knew everybody in Chicago. And I was able to get in touch with my city, which I’d lost touch with because I’d been out in California for a while.

MM: That’s fascinating. You didn’t use a casting director, you used Studs Terkel?

HW: Yeah. Because he knew everybody. He knew the real people.

MM: I wanted to ask you about John Sayles and Matewan. Do you have any recollections about your experiences with that film or working with John that you can talk about?

HW: Working with John is always good. On Matewan, it was particularly good because I had shot documentaries before. I shot a coal mine disaster in Centralia, Illinois when I was very young and living in Chicago. And I was really interested in shooting that. And in the piece of the coal mine that we shot in Matewan, I got little aluminum flecks and was able to wet them and sort of throw them on the coal, and it sort of blended in so that the coal sort of gave little light, because it’s very hard to shoot coal and people, particularly black people. I just remember that technical thing. But working with John is a thrill, because it’s difficult. John is used to making low-budget films, and you shoot bing, bing, bing—like that. And he gives his actors back stories, so when they come in, they’re ready to act. You could make a film of any of the backstories John Sayles gives his actors.

MM: You’re very generous with your time and I could talk with you all day, but I’ve taken up twice as much as I was allotted already. Thanks so much, Haskell, and please keep up the amazing work you’re doing, both cinematically and socially, for a long time to come.

HW: Thank you, it’s been a pleasure.